It's time to take a look at gear in detail and observe the Nemesis system during fort assaults in Shadow of War!

Video Details

Game Details

Middle Earth Shadow Of War Game Overview:

Conquer Fortresses and dominate Mordor from within. Experience how the award-winning Nemesis System creates unique personal stories with every enemy and follower, and confront the full power of the Dark Lord Sauron and his Ringwraiths in this epic new story of Middle-earth.

Transcript

Hello my dear beautiful bastards and welcome home. I'm here yet again to discuss things that were discussed in the recent developer livestream plus the recent Nemesis video. I made a video talking about the gear and I mostly focused on the gems since that was the only thing that was kinda overlooked in the ign coverage but thanks to the devs, we can take a closer look at all available gear that will be in Shadow of War.

We'll start with the sword because that's the first item on the UI so it makes the most sense. The base statistic of the sword is melee damage and it affects the glaive as well. If you forgot, the glaive is a very long stick sword that allows you to swipe multiple orcs at once. Since the sword is a melee weapon, it has melee attributes. This means that when you have a sword that gives you additional melee damage or any other melee related boost, it will affect the dagger as well because the dagger is also a melee weapon.

Now when it comes to the dagger, its base stat is stealth damage. Basically when you approach an enemy from stealth, they will always be stabbed with the dagger. As I mentioned a moment ago, the dagger can share the properties of the sword as long as it is related to melee damage because stealth damage is actually melee damage as well. Unfortunately they didn't talk more about the sword or dagger because Mike had to go to away, I suspect he needed to poop but they didn't go into detail about that.

When it comes to the bow, the base stat is ranged attack. It is possible to use different types of bows, some will be regular, some will be long bows, suitable for sniping and those will have a lower amount of maximum elfshot available. Another ranged weapon that will be available is the hammer that we talked about before. Just as a reminder, the hammer is slower and has less range but is more powerful than the bow. It also has less elfshot to balance the power difference. The traits that the bow can bring are related to rate of fire, regular or piercing damage, shadowstrike or shadowmount bonuses and it lets you have more range or precision when detonating world objects such as cages or things that hang from the ropes. It will be possible to have poisoned, fiery or cursed arrows by using the might power. In regards to enemies, aside from the standard orcs with bows, ologs will have throwable mallets and handcannons that shoot harpoons.

The armor is next. Its base stat is health and it can feature traits related to health. For example you can have something that refills your might meter faster if your health is full or you get more damage when your health is low. Armors will be obtainable through orc murder and you don't actually get the armor from that orc's body, you simply get it as a reward for murdering him. There are 9 confirmed legendary sets of armor, one per each orc tribe, 1 from a collectible set, 1 from Nagzul and 2 additonal sets from the DLC tribes.

The cloak's base stat is stealth. Stealth represents Talion's ability to stay hidden, which is pretty obvious now when I say it. Basically as your stealth number grows the detection meter is slower and you're able to maneuver around without being seen. Common traits associated with the cloak are related to speed and time such as reduction of the duration of curses, poisons and fires. It is not customizable and it is called cloak and not cape because Tolkien never used the word cape to describe it. I know it says cape in the screenshot but they fixed it, it's alpha after all. The game won't have skins at launch and you aren't able to skin the beasts that you kill.

The ring of power is last. Its base stat is focus which lets you use Celebrimbor's abilities. Mike mentioned that there will be more than one ring in the game but the one that we have is the only one that we will use. We will simply apply runes to it to change the traits that it has. The traits can be very much about anything and they can synergize with other gear very easily.

Now when it comes to the general information regarding gear, we learned that the items have different levels, rarity and upgrades. The levels can go up to 60 and each item has 4 upgrade variations with further varied color types. Common items can be upgraded using the Mirian coins as I mentioned before. Epic items differ from common by the fact that you can complete a challenge to unlock an additional trait while legendary items also have the bonus from a completed set. Furthermore, Legendary items can be upgraded much further compared to common, they didn't mention how much exactly but since there are 4 upgrade variations, I suspect that may be the limit but we don't know yet. The armor and weapons have no durability and as you upgrade it, it will get more ornaments and fancy shapes that will indicate that it is indeed upgraded.

The gems, that I talked about in the previous video, are as I assumed, separated by tiers and you can combine multiple gems of the same type to create a gem of higher quality. They also confirmed that the stats of the gems will differ based on the slot they're in. Once the gem is placed, it can't be removed unless you decide to destroy the weapon, then you get the gem back. Otherwise the only way to remove the gem from the slot is by overwriting it with another gem. If you want to search for specific gems, you can't do that exactly but we know that rare beasts drop gems so all you gotta do is get a Feral overlord in a region, issue hunting orders and then follow your orcs around until they find a rare beast. Orcs with orders will not bring back gems, you need to go with them and kill the beast yourself.

It will be possible to manipulate the gear that gets dropped from killed orcs. The dropped gear will be influenced by the way you kill the orc in question. For example if you kill them by shooting them in the head with a fiery arrow there will be a big chance the dropped item will either be a bow with fire related traits or a rune with fire or ranged stats. It is a very cool way of adding even more randomness to the game, even though this type of randomness is kinda calculated since you can simply start murdering everyone with fire and have the most glorious fiery set. Encountering a fire immune legendary overlord might become a problem then so mixing things up will certainly be useful.

I have gotten comments from you guys telling me to take a look at the Nemesis system video that Mike narrated the other day so here are my observations.

The first thing we get to see is the fortress army screen. One thing that caught my eye are the little bars above the orcs. Only some of the orcs have them and I honestly can't think of what it may be. We know nothing about it so if you have any ideas, feel free to post them in the comments.

Next we see one of the warchiefs whose mortal weakness is hysterical master which makes him flee when his bodyguard dies. Being a mortal weakness, getting rid of him seems quite easy. Another orc shown has a weakness to beast attacks. If you remember, a weakness will simply chunk his health down quite a bit as opposed to a mortal one that will completely break them.

Now before we check out the other details, I should mention that while the fortress assault is like a boss battle, the orcs within it will still roam through the world and you will be able to mark them, find them and kill them. If you don't build your character so he can easily kill a warchief, you might not be able to assassinate anyone and you'll be forced to do a full on assault with your allies. This is why the character customization and gear combinations will matter quite a bit in case you wanted to conquer regions.

We can continue to see the overlord who has a weakness towards poison and beast attacks while his main warchief has no weaknesses but can be damaged by ranged attacks, executions and explosions so if we take all of this information into consideration, we should probably assault this fort with a caragor mount, a feral tribe bodyguard and a very good bow with poison effects. This gives you a very nice example of how varied these locations will be. You'll always need to shift through the enemies stats and see what works best against them, otherwise you will most definitely fail at doing anything useful and cry yourself to sleep.

They've shown us the changes that each tribe brings to the region and the hypeman. HYPEMAN.

Killing the warchief and destroying the monument that spreads the influence of the overlord will bring the fortress level down which will give us a fighting chance to take it over. I gotta wonder does the influence only affect the fortress level or does it change the appearance within the region as well. Say we destroy all monuments, will the appearance of the region become more generic with random orcs or will it only lower the fortress level?

As the fort assault approaches the overlord mentions how we already failed to take the fort. So I assume that during this playthrough, the person playing tried to take it over and failed so how the overlord is mocking us, which is pretty cool.

Another thing I noticed is that while the overlord of a particular fort can be from a specific tribe, that doesn't mean that all warchiefs in that fort will be from the same tribe. Swapping the overlords automatically changes the entire region and it can be done very quickly and easily.

It really does seem like they tried very hard to make sure there is no repetitiveness and while being able to change the overlord at any time seems convenient, I hope doing that will make the original overlord salty and potentially lead him to betrayal. I feel like constantly swapping them around with no consequences will be bad but they did mention that all actions will have consequences so I trust we will get stabbed in the butt if we decide to mess with them too much. Don't forget, you will need to use Mirian coins to upgrade forts because enemy orcs in the region will try to take it back and if your defenses are too weak, you will lose it.

That's all from me for now and with the end of April comes the end of IGN first for Shadow of War but don't worry, I will still seek new information and gameplay at all times. If you wish to join the glorious community of Monolith, please join the Discord that will be linked below.

Thanks for watching and make sure to let me know what interests you the most about Shadow of War.

I have been Petard your glorious lord and may the blessings of Petardia eternally touch your butt.